Posts Tagged ‘currency’

Our industry project for Intel resulted in a video scenario for a service concept we called Ecopup. Since our target user was a young, upwardly mobile professional living in a big Asian city, we decided to situate the scenario around the typical lifestyle of such a user.

The service was visualized as being something that would be accessible through any standard Corporate Benefits program. It would use a combination of online communications, personal messaging, social networking, and location-aware technologies to prompt shifts in the lifestyle of the user towards more sustainable practices and choices. If the individual made such choices, he or she would be offered incentives, all of which would feed back into a reward system. The points earned in this manner would be held by the individual as a kind of currency or capital, which could then be exchanged, traded or used for other sustainable activities.

This video makes a demonstration of how one scenario for Ecopup might work.

Based on user feedback on the Elevator Buzz concept for Intel, my team quickly realized that systemic solutions designed to generate and sustain conversations around sustainable practices had viability. Then our next concern became the issue that some users had raised around ‘incentive’ – “I think this is a good thing to part of, but whats in it for me?” This got us interested in alternative currencies – can sustainable choices made by individuals translate into a currency with the possibility for real world use?

As an impromptu exercise for provoking new perspectives when exploring this area, here are some word clouds I generated on Wordle. I used the Wikipedia Community Currencies page and the Kashklash project home page to find make three different wordles. Interestingly, they had different characteristics as seen below.

Wordle of five random articles from Wikipedia's 'Community Currencies' page. Made with http://www.wordle.net/.

When five random articles from Wikipedia’s ‘Community Currencies’ pages were wordled together, the word ‘currency’ obviously stood out, with ‘eco-money’ making a surprise leap into the forefront.

Wordle of almost all pages together from Wikipedia's 'Community Currencies' page. Made with http://www.wordle.net.

But when almost all the articles from Wikipedia’s ‘Community Currencies’ pages were wordled together, ‘local’ was the clear winner, with ‘economic’, ‘services’ and ‘people’ starting to become prominent as well.

Finally, when the text from Kashklash.com’s home page was wordled, the prominent words were even more interesting: ‘sharing’, ‘communities’, ‘people’, ‘future’.

Driven by exercises like these and others, my team began to explore the question about whether communities of practice could be built around sustainability, which could also exchange any ‘wealth’ generated between the individuals in the community.